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Unity 6.6 arrives, is headed for Ubuntu 12.10

Canonical's Unity desktop has been updated to version 6.6 and includes several improvements in the functionality of its lenses as well as better windows and work space management. While the current beta of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is shipping with Unity 6.4, the second beta, which is supposed to arrive on 27 September, is expected to include the new version of the desktop environment.

Unity 6.6 comes with a new shopping lens and the video lens has also been improved. The general preview functionality for all lenses has also received some developer attention. Lenses are essentially search filters in the Dash interface that allow users to find a certain type of content, such as videos, music or even cooking recipes, across a variety of resources, both on their local machine and from the internet.

The desktop shell's window and workspace management is now more flexible. Launcher icons can be reordered and when a user switches been multiple application windows, those windows now scale. Unity now also respects the selected theme for window decorations.

As this code is entering Ubuntu at a relatively late stage of the release process, the developers have called for users to perform some extra testing on the release. Users of the current beta of Ubuntu 12.10 can test the release by performing a dist-upgrade of their packages.